The Internet is becoming more and more the focal point of our culture. Spreading plays a significantly role – and it is easy: just a simple mouse click. Creatives of all categories and genres (visual arts, music, literature, poetry, photography, etc) present their work on their websites and enrich the web. Of course, all these works are copyrighted. Use or distribution is prohibited by default. But many artists would like to share their work – even if only under certain conditions. [This article is about CreativeCommons – it offers a infographic that explains it.]

The problem is that licensing terms and agreements are a complicated thing. Many creative people do not know exactly how they need to formulate these conditions correctly so that they are stable and legally. And the user often are not sure what the license Terms (formulated by the artist) should mean exactly. What is when and where and how to use for free ?

The solution: this is where the non-profit organization Creative Commons („CC“): it offers six licensing models. The current version is 3.0 CC. There are four possible conditions that were shown by icons or short-texts (chars).

But: for many people the meaning of the icons or the short-text (eg. BY-NC-ND) is not clear. Therefor I made an infographic to visualize things. Hope it helps :-)

What means Creative Commons? Infographic by Martin Missfeldt

Feel free to use and share. This infografik is distributed under CC-BY-SA (now you should understand what it means ;-) Would be nice if you link to this article. Click on the image to get the picture in a higher solution if you want to print it out.

[…] not familiar with how Creative Commons works, it can be somewhat confusing. The infographic below, created by Martin Missfeldt, does a nice job of clearly and simply defining each of the six types of Creative Commons […]